User blog:Helanhalvan/Helanhalvan's guide to how to make magic decks
__NOEDITSECTION__ This is aimed at players that have a small card pool and who might be new to Magic: The Gathering. It is an introduction to how to make magic decks, somewhat of a repost and a collaboration with a bunch of people. More about that in the end of the post. =Get some cards= ---- The first step toward making a deck is to get a hold of some cards. The starter box currently contains 129 unique cards. These are unlocked either by buying a booster from each set, or by completing their respective campaigns. When it comes to choosing which sets to buy, I think all of them are of about the same power level. You can't really spend your gold poorly. But some players have their own opinions about what sets to get first. Personally, I just say follow your heart/instincts. =Basics of how to build decks= ---- There are two ways of building decks right now in Magic Duels. One of them is using the "Deck Wizard". This tool can help you construct decks, and might help you get some decks going in the first place. Personally, I started playing the paper game in 2006 myself, so when I got to Duels, I already knew how to build decks and so I have not used the Deck Wizard a lot. While I like the system, it is really for getting people started building decks and looking at what the resulting decks look like, which can be helpful for understanding what types of cards and how many of each a certain deck needs. This post is mainly for trying to cover these basics. =What a deck needs= ---- There are a few things a deck needs to work effectively: *tempo *colors *themes You don't have to know all of these before you start building a deck. However, when it's "done" (more on that later) you should have these all figured out. 'Tempo' Tempo is how fast your deck is. You can think of it like "on what turn do I plan to win the game". Let's look at some extremes first. There is a competitive deck-type called [http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=12218&d=270291&f=LE RDW]. It is the most aggressive deck you will find in most tournaments. In all aspects this deck is built to win the game as fast as possible, with no plan whatsoever for what is going to happen later in the game. This deck will play all cards in its hand quickly and hope you run out of life before they run out of cards. On the other end of the spectrum you have what's called control decks that usually don't have a specific turn range in mind for winning, but their plan is more like "when my opponent has no cards left in his hand, I'll still have plenty and win". While a specific turn might sound very exact, having a general idea will help you understand what kind of cards will help your deck. A typical kind of card consideration this can help with is: Do I want in my deck? It's a very good card, but it does not help you win early. 'Colors and lands' There are a lot of options when it comes to what colors to play. First of all, I strongly recommend running about 24 lands. Running less might seem like a good idea, but not being able to play a land on one of your turns, especially early on, will likely cause you to lose the game. When it comes to how many colors to run, there are some pros and cons to running more colors. The more colors you run, the more different cards you can play. Having more cards to choose from makes your deck run better cards on average. 'More colors, more problems?' ---- However, there is a real drawback to this. For each color you add to a deck, the harder it becomes to have the right mana to play all your cards. In order to compensate for this, you can run "Dual Lands". These are lands that tap for more than one type of mana. However, these lands often have drawbacks. To get a hands-on idea for how to do this let's look at some mana bases: *24 , this guarantees that you can cast cards which require black mana, every turn from turn 1. Even cards that require a lot of black mana will not be a problem. You will never have lands enter the field tapped and make you unable to play a card on a given turn. Phyrexian Obliterator can be cast on turn 4, no problem. *11 , 11 , 2 (R/B), this gives you lands that will (almost) always be untapped when entering the field, and quite good access to both Red and Black mana, however, you will have a hard time casting cards like Phyrexian Obliterator. *9 , 9 , 2 (R/B), 4 (R/B, always tapped), This mana base is slower, as some of your dual lands will enter the battlefield tapped. However, now you still can probably cast spells like Phyrexian Obliterator. Even if it's not on turn 4. *2 (R/B), 2 (R/W), 2 (W/B), 4 (R/B, always tapped), 4 (B/W, always tapped), 4 (R/W, always tapped), 2 , 2 , 2 . Now we have fairly good access to White, Black and Red. However, almost all of our lands now enter the battlefield tapped, which means our deck will be slower than you might expect. All of these mana bases are viable. It's important to understand the trade-offs. There is much more to mana bases than this. It's the thing that makes Magic stand out from among a lot of other CCGs. 'Splashing, the art of running half a color' ---- As we have now covered how adding more colors can make your deck behave worse but gives you more cards, I'll show you an underutilized trick. Say that we are playing mono-red (red only), have a real issue with late game, and have a hard time finding good cards that are red and help us with that. One option is to pick another color and add it to our deck. However, that will require us to have a two color mana base, which is worse than our current red-only mana base. A second option is splashing a color. In this case, let's look at . This card allows you to spend a lot of mana every turn to kill small creatures, which would really help late game, so it can fix the problem our deck faces. Now we just need the mana to be able to cast it somehow. The thing with adding just is that you don't really need a lot of black mana to make him work. You can cast him off of 4 Mountain and a single Swamp. For this reason, you can use this mana base: 2 Swamp, 2 Dragonskull Summit(B/R), 20 Mountain This mana base is extremely unlikely to not get enough red mana, and have no tapped lands. However, when you want to play Nightfire Giant, you need at least 5 lands, and will be quite likely to have the black mana you need available at that time. Let's review what we have just done. We had a deck that needed a specific type of card that was in a different color ( , a card for winning late game). That card cost a lot of mana (5 mana in total), but had only one mana symbol of a color our deck did not use (one black mana). Therefore we added a few lands (2 and 2 ) to our deck to enable us to play that specific card, and added it to our deck. One important thing to remember is that if you splash for a card that costs a small mount of mana (less than 4), you have fewer lands, and are more likely to not have the right colors for it. 'Themes and Synergy, cards that help other cards' There are a lot of cards that make other cards better. How much better varies wildly. This can take many shapes and forms, and having a true understanding of all the interactions is something even very experienced players struggle with. Let's look at some examples to get a practical idea of what we are talking about. 'EPIC COMBO!' ---- Combo is one of these interaction types. Take for example Time Vault and Voltaic Key. Both of these cards hardly do anything on their own, but if you have them both, you can use the key to untap Time Vault every turn. This will give you one more turn every turn, which will mean that your opponent is done having turns. This is a very strong interaction. If you only have one of the pieces, you have cards that do nothing. If you have both then you instantly win the game. We do not have these super strong combos in Magic Duels yet, but they might show up at some point. There are also weaker combos, and what counts as a combo is hard to define. The important point is that you either have both a Time Vault and a Voltaic Key, or neither of them. Time Vault.jpg|'Time Vault' (This card is not included in Magic Duels and serves explanatory purposes only.) Voltaic Key.jpg|'Voltaic Key' (This card is not included in Magic Duels and serves explanatory purposes only.) 'Tribes' ---- Tribes is another thing that goes under the "themes" umbrella. For example, cards like and all the elves. Simply, there are a lot of elves in the game that make other elves better, or do something for each elf you have. Because of this, you either try to run a bunch of elves and some of the elf "tribal" cards (the cards that count elves), or don't run that many elves, or any of the elf buffing cards. 'Condition requiring cards' ---- Cards like and are cards that require some form of condition to be fulfilled if they are to be used to their greatest potential. Looking for cards with similar conditions can help build a powerful deck. For example, having a lot of Delirium cards, and having some other cards for "activating" Delirium. 'Other types of synergy' ---- There are also some more non-obvious interactions between cards such as Cancel and . There is nothing about these cards that makes one of them interact with the other. However, having both in your deck still gives you an edge. This is because you can play on turn 2, and then not play anything on turn 3, as you have your mana ready for casting Cancel on your opponent's next spell. When you do this, will become a 4/4. There are tons of smaller or bigger effects like this. 'What to do with all this information?' ---- The main thing to remember about themes is that, just like with colors, more is not always better. Having no themes means that you run a lot of powerful individual cards, which might very well be better than using some theme for synergy. It is possible to run many themes in one deck of course. =The end?= ---- Deck building is an iterative process so any deck you build will be changed after testing it. If it's ever completed, it's usually after weeks of testing. When changing the deck, some of the main properties of the deck might change. Big thanks to my minions/editors that fixed a lot of spelling errors and other problems. evilfrenchguy BrewBrewBrewTheDeck HolyCrap_WOTF I have some other posts that are yet to be fixed up, and take suggestions on other stuff to cover. Category:Blog posts Category:Deck building Category:Guides